Thompson on education

Via The Corner I read that Fred Thompson has recently criticized "No Child Left Behind" (he voted for its passage). Thompson Criticizes No Child Left Behind - washingtonpost.com. From the article:

"We've been spending increasing amounts of federal money for decades, with increasing rules, increasing mandates, increasing regulations," Thompson said. "It's not working."

He added that there are problems with Bush's No Child Left Behind program, which requires annual testing and punishes schools that don't make progress.

"No Child Left Behind _ good concept, I'm all for testing _ but it seems like now some of these states are teaching to the test and kind of making it so that everybody does well on the test _ you can't really tell that everybody's doing that well. And it's not objective," Thompson said.

Instead, he said the federal government should be providing block grants as long as states set up objective testing programs.

He said his message to states would be, "We expect you to get objective testing done and publicize those tests for the local parents and for the local citizens and suffer the political ramifications locally if things don't work out right."

I agree with most of Thompson's observations/criticisms on the matter, but it seems to me that the OBVIOUS answer is to not have education dollars routed through a Federal Educational bureaucracy, right?

I'm wondering if Thompson's middle-of-the-road tendencies will be the biggest drag on his primary campaign.